alt Hacker NewsI think that there are some subscriptions to go by. Z.ai subscription might still be interesting. I once haggled with kimi to get it for 1$ per month. I can only help in providing pointers:
If you wish to go Non-API but rather subscription route: Z.Ai subscription/ Kimi subscription / MiniMax subscriptions are good. You could also take a look at ollama subscription and opencode subscriptions.
If you wish to go API route: Deepseek v4 pro /mimo v2.5 pro models are comparably good if your work can do that. Codex for all its failure and for as much respect that I had within Anthropic when they had fought against the govt. which Anthropic is slowly losing again by doing some pretty dystopian actions again so Codex subscription might make sense as well.
It depends on multiple things but hopefully i am able to provide some interesting things
If you wish to run models locally, unless you are specifically buying gigs for running them locally which is almost always about privacy rather than costs, then you are always better off with qwen models so if you got a 64-128GB laptop for example. You could run Qwen models and see where things go.
Hope this helps ya!
Extremely helpful, thanks! I think I'l go the OpenRouter route for a while to explore various models, then weigh the option.
I do kind of like basing decisions somewhat on the API costs, because they reveal what the true costs will be after the eventual rug-pull on subscription pricing.
Even seeing the API costs of Claude Code today to a year ago are pretty eye-watering. I think there's a ton of room, at least for my workflows, to go back to far less capable models.
I've run local models in the past a bit, and explored LLM ops somewhat, and have zero desire to do it anymore, haha. It's fun as a hobby, but there's tons of other homelab stuff for me to play with.